Kant's First Paralogism

Kant’s Critique of Pure reason sets out with the agenda of offering that critical mediation between Rationalism and Empiricism. The basic argumentative architecture of Critique of Pure Reason can be classified into- Transcendental Aesthetics and Transcendental Logic. The former deals with the forms of intuition viz. space-time and the latter one is dealt with in a chapter called The Refutation of idealism wherein Kant investigates the limits of rational thoughts. Transcendental Logic can again be subdivided into Transcendental Analytic and Transcendental Dialectic. The discussion of ‘categories of mind’ is included in the former. Transcendental Dialectics seeks to reject the application of rational faculties in the non-empirical realm. It is Transcendental Dialectics that shall be the focus of this paper. This paper is divided into three segments. The first segment shall attempt to offer to give an insight into transcendental psychology by discussing Kant’s notion of ‘unity of apperception’. The second segment shall deal with the limits of reason that are imposed by transcendental psychology. These ‘limits’ in general include Paralogisms of Pure Reasons as well as Antinomies; however, this paper shall focus only on paralogisms. Finally this paper shall close with a few concluding remarks in the final segment of the paper.

2014

Kant-Studien (Forthcoming)

According to Kant, the arguments of rational psychology are formal fallacies that he calls transcendental paralogisms. There is a long-standing debate, however, whether there in fact is any formal error in the inferences that Kant presents: according to Grier and Allison, they are deductively invalid syllogisms, whereas Bennett, Ameriks, and Van Cleve deny that they are formal fallacies at all. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between logical and transcendental paralogisms, I advance a novel interpretation that can reconcile these extremes: transcendental paralogisms are valid in what Kant calls general logic but constitute formal fallacies in his transcendental logic. By formalising the paralogistic inference I will furthermore pinpoint the error as an illegitimate existential presupposition that neglects the laws of transcendental logic. Since – unlike transcendental logic – general logic abstracts from all relation to objects, this error can only be detected in transcendental but not in general logic. This interpretation has the additional virtue of making it possible to detach Kant’s critique of pure rational psychology from his transcendental idealism, greatly magnifying its scope and potency as a refutation of all rationalistic metaphysics of mind.

Kant's Philosophy of the Unconscious, 2012

A question that has gone unasked for a long time in Kant research is whether and to what extent, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the central concept of apperception or the so-called transcendental or original selfconsciousness implies a form of concrete consciousness beyond purely formal and functional characteristics. It is thought to be entirely uncontroversial that that which produces objective knowledge and which Kant denoted with the concept of apperception only has transcendentally necessary significance and is entirely inaccessible to concrete consciousness. This deeply entrenched interpretation can be explained by programmatic reasons above all, whereby the lesson of the paralogisms chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason plays an important role. Here Kant shows that there can be no justification for assuming a Cartesian soul that would be accessible to knowledge. This can only make it seem substantially wrong-headed to wish to interpret the consciousness involved in apperception, which according to Kant underlies all structured thought, as a form of phenomenal consciousness that could somehow be made apparent from the first-person perspective. One could even argue that the very attempt to locate any phenomenal self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason is contrary to the entire project of the critique of knowledge, since Kant is concerned to justify propositional knowledge through conditions that are independent of experience and can be legitimately applied to the material of empirical intuition. This sort of approach necessitates a strict distinction in the theory between a priori structures on the one hand and empirical or psychological aspects of the consciousness of objects on the other hand-a distinction famously reflected in the Critique of Pure Reason in the sharp terminological oppositions of attributes such as "empirical" and "pure/transcendental", "a priori" and "a posteri-1 This paper was originally published in German in 2007 under the title "Vorbegriffliches Selbstbewusstsein bei Kant?". Translation by Karsten Schçllner.

I consider Kant's criticism of rational psychology in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason in light of his German predecessors. I first present Wolff's foundational account of metaphysical psychology with the result that Wolff's rational psychology is not comfortably characterized as a naïvely rationalist psychology. I then turn to the reception of Wolff's account among later German metaphysicians, and show that the same claim of a dependence of rational upon empirical psychology is found in the publications and lectures of Kant's pre-Critical period. Considering the Paralogisms in this context reveals Kant's conception of rational psychology to be distinctly novel and has important consequences in shifting the argumentative focus of the chapter.

In this paper, I explore notions of selfhood implicit and explicit in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, particularly the transcendental impasse and the impossibility of cognising a unity to the empirical self.

2007

The paper presents one of the sources of the incoherence objection to Kant’s transcendental idealism, i.e. the problem of “affection” between the “transcendental ground” and mental representations. It is divided into two sections: in the first the historical context of the problem is sketched; in the second two contemporary solutions to the problem are suggested. The latter include N. Rescher’s “conceptual idealist” interpretation, which postulates a logical (rational) relation between representational content and its “ground”, and A. Brook’s cognitivist explanation, which appeals to a materialist hypothesis that makes use of a kind of correlation between the mental and the physical. The conclusion grants both stances considerable plausibility, admitting that, as often is the case, Kant’s way of posing questions here too leads to contradictory answers. It seems that the options suggested cannot be reconciled: one has to choose between the presence of metaphysics in Kant’s critical p...

Kantian Yearbook, 2014

In his pre-critical lectures on rational psychology, Kant employs an argument from the I to the transcendental freedom of the soul. In the (A-edition of the) first Critique, he distances himself from rational psychology, and instead offers four paralogisms of this doctrine, insisting that ‘I think’ no longer licenses any inferences about a soul. Kant also comes alive to the possibility that we could be thinking mechanisms - rational beings, but not agents. These developments rob him of his pre-critical rationalist argument for freedom. In the Groundwork, this is a serious problem; if we are not free, morality will be a phantasm for us. In Groundwork III, Kant attempts to overcome this by offering a new argument for our freedom, involving the standpoint of practical reason. In this paper, I detail these developments and present a practical and phenomenological reading of Kant’s approach in Groundwork III. I also venture a defence of this new argument.

2014

According to Kant, idealism is a “scandal of philosophy”. unlike hume, Kant is not satis ed to point out that human beings are not capable of abandoning their belief in outer things in practical life. Kant aims to offer a satisfactory proof of the existence of outer things. my claim in this paper is that Kant’s de nitive proof of the existence of outer things is fundamentally connected to his new conception of the empirical self as a being in the world (Weltwesen), a conception that emerges in the second edition of the rst Critique and is fully articulated in re ections from 1788 onward. in order to make my point, i analyse the Refutation of Idealism in the Criticism of the Fourth Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology, the Kantian theory of inferential cognition of existences, Kant’s critical theory of the “object”, and the Refutation of Idealism from 1787 onward.

Co-edited with Anil Gomes, Oxford University Press, 2017

The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? What kinds of empirical models can be given of these operations? In what sense, and in what ways, are intuitions object-dependent? How should we understand the nature of the imagination? What is inner sense, and what does it mean to say that time is the form of inner sense? Can we cognize ourselves through inner sense? How do we self-ascribe our beliefs and what role does self-consciousness play in our judgments? Is the will involved in judging? What kind of knowledge can we have of the self ? And what kind of knowledge of the self does Kant proscribe? These essays showcase the depth of Kant’s writings in the philosophy of mind, and the centrality of those writings to his wider philosophical project. Moreover, they show the continued relevance of Kant’s writings to contemporary debates about the nature of mind and self. Contents: 0. Introduction Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson 1. Kant, The Philosophy Of Mind, And Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy Anil Gomes 2. Synthesis And Binding Lucy Allais 3. Understanding Non-Conceptual Representation Of Objects: Empirical Models Of Sensibility’s Operation Katherine Dunlop 4. Are Kantian Intuitions Object-Dependent? Stefanie Grüne 5. Intuition And Presence Colin McLear 6. Imagination And Inner Intuition Andrew Stephenson 7. Inner Sense And Time Ralf M. Bader 8. Can’t Kant Cognize Himself? Or, A Problem For (Almost) Every Interpretation Of The Refutation Of Idealism Andrew Chignell 9. A Kantian Critique Of Transparency Patricia Kitcher 10. Judging For Reasons: On Kant And The Modalities Of Judgment Jessica Leech 11. Kant On Judging And The Will Jill Vance Buroker 12. Self and Selves Ralph C. S. Walker 13. Subjects Of Kant’s First Paralogism Tobias Rosefeldt 14. The Lessons Of Kant’s Paralogisms Paul Snowdon